…….two weeks of fun in America……..Cleveland GOP Convention Day One…good luck to us…..

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GOP, RIP?
By E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free
Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to
stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its
founders saw as undermining free institutions.The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected
the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the
federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth
and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what
John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described
disdainfully as “the national impulse.” It was, in fact, a good
impulse.But the Republicans who held their first national convention 160 years
ago were more than just Northern Whigs. Their ranks also included many
former Democrats who shared a fervor for the anti-slavery cause
and helped take some of the Whiggish, elitist edge off this ingathering
of idealists and practical politicians.“The admixture of Whig and Democratic politics inside the Republican
Party,” writes historian Sean Wilentz in “The Politicians & The
Egalitarians,” his recently published book, “created a forthright
democratic nationalism, emboldening the federal government, for a
time, at once to stimulate economic development and broaden its
benefits.”The Republicans descending on Cleveland would thus have every right to
insist that all Americans owe a large debt to the GOP. We are a
better, freer and more prosperous nation because their party was born.What the heck is happening at the Republican National Convention?

Of course it would be historically naive to pretend that time has
stood still since 1856. To do so would mean ignoring that the South,
which hated the original Republicans, is now the dominant force in the
party. It would involve being blind to the way in which our two great
political parties have switched sides in how they view the capacity of
our federal government to promote a more inclusive prosperity.

It would be equally untrue to history to claim that the nativism of
Donald Trump is alien to the party. On the contrary, the
anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings were an important force in
early Republicanism, and the party embraced opposition to newcomers at
various points in subsequent eras.

Nonetheless, Republicans who are not in the least progressive have
reason to mourn what is likely to come to pass this week: the
transformation of the Party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower into the
Party of Trump. Some are bravely resisting this outcome to the end —
and good luck to them. A fair number of leading Republicans have
stated flatly that they will never vote for Trump. Their devotion to
principle and integrity will be remembered.

But so many others in the party have found ways of rationalizing
support for a man who plainly does not take governing, policy or even
what he says from one day to the next seriously. It is comical but
also embarrassing to watch politicians and consultants fall all over
themselves to declare that Trump is “maturing” because every once in a
while, he reads partisan talking points off a teleprompter. This is
seen as a great advance over the normal Trump, whose free-association
rants refer to his opponents as “lyin’,” “crooked,” “sad,” “weak,”
“low-energy” and — in the very special case of Sen. Elizabeth Warren —
“Pocahontas.”

Liberals have long complained about conservatives “dog whistling”
appeals to racial animosity. But hypocrisy really is the tribute vice
pays to virtue and so it does mark a decline in simple decency that
Trump has shouted out his prejudices openly: falsely claiming that
Barack Obama, our first African American president, was not born in
the United States; railing against Mexican immigrants as “rapists”;
and calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the
United States.”

And a party that helped build popular support for internationalism
after World War II is about to turn to a man whose foreign policy
pronouncements defy coherence. He’s not even consistent in supporting
noninterventionism or protectionism, both of which are part of a
historically legitimate Republican tradition. He substitutes bullying
for choosing, bluster for strength.

Many Republicans oppose Trump because they see him as the one
candidate most likely to lose to Hillary Clinton. But others fear
something worse: a Trump victory. They know that his presidency would
represent a grave danger to the republic, a repudiation of the most
noble Republican aspirations, and the end of their party as a serious
vehicle for governance. The GOP can survive a Trump defeat. It will
never get over being permanently defined by his politics of flippant
brutality.

The Republican National Committee (RNC), the convention will host approximately 2,470 delegates and 2,302 alternate delegates from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories.

The convention will also include approximately 15,000 credentialed media as well as a global audience that will witness a front row seat online thanks to our Internet and social media efforts.

…….. roughly 50,000 people are expected to visit the Cleveland area during the gathering.

2016 will mark the fourth time the Republican Party will convene its convention in Ohio. The Buckeye State also played host to the 1876, 1924 and 1936 Republican National Conventions in Cincinnati (’76) and Cleveland (’24 and ’36).

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Tonight they’re going to warm us up with a star studded NOT line up of speakers……with Melania Trump out front…..

VOX SAYS….

Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s third and current wife, is speaking tonight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

According to Google search trends data, many people would like to know where she is from and how old she is. The answer is that she’s 46 — born in 1970 in Sevnica, Slovenia.

Slovenia, to be clear, is not the same country as Slovakia. Slovakia is north of Hungary and south of Poland and used to be part of Czechoslovakia. Slovenia is east of Italy and south of Austria and used to be part of Yugoslavia.

Melania left Slovenia relatively young for a career as a model in Milan and Paris and then New York, where she met Donald Trump in the late 1990s and married him in 2005.

Melania says her husband isn’t Hitler

Melania Trump has not articulated many strong political views over the years but has attempted to assure American audiences that her husband is “not Hitler” and really simply “wants to unite the country and bring people together and bring jobs back.”

Now I’m getting phone calls from a blocked number that play Hitler’s speeches when I pick up. Sad!

Melania’s view on this was a little odd.

“I don’t control my fans,” she said to DuJour when asked if she should do something to stop this kind of harassment, “but I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”

Melania would arguably be America’s first immigrant first lady

John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson, currently has the distinction of being the only foreign-born first lady in American history, but her father was an American merchant and diplomat who was living in London when Louisa was born — making her something of a liminal case.

There is a certain irony in Melania’s foreign-born status given the strong association between the Trump campaign and anti-immigration themes — including promises to restrict legal immigration — but polling Vox has done in partnership with Morning Consult shows that European immigrants are perceived very differently from Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrants.

When she speaks tonight, you’ll notice that Melania speaks English with a fairly heavy accent despite having lived in the United States since 1996. When listening, keep in mind that English is actually her sixth language, behind not just Slovenian (her native language) and Serbo-Croatian (the main language of Yugoslavia when she was a kid) but also Italian, French, and German, all of which she learned over the course of her career as a model.

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……how about the guy who really wrote Trump’s “Art Of the Deal”…..

Trump’s ghostwriter: he’s a sociopath who, if elected president, could end civilization

As the ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz spent more than a year with the businessman. The book, which was largely penned by Schwartz, helped create Trump’s national reputation as a savvy dealmaker.

For the next 30 years, Schwartz watched as Trump’s fame continued to grow — first as the star of the reality show The Apprentice, and eventually as the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party.

While he was working on the book, Trump gave Schwartz unprecedented access to his business dealings, letting him listen in on dozens of calls. As a result, Schwartz says, he got to know Trump better than anyone outside his family. In a new interview with the New Yorker, Schwartz says he “genuinely” believes that if Trump were the president of the United States, “there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization”:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

This, of course, is strikingly different from the narrative Trump has told on the campaign trail.

But Schwartz portrays Trump as a pathologically self-centered man with the attention span of a 9-year-old. Given that the president is often called on to quickly absorb complex information and then make high-stakes decisions, this personality trait might prove to be a liability in the White House.